Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Doncha just hate snipers!

[Jools]

After some years spent thrashing the nuts off my ST chasing superbikes round the country it's getting shabby so I'm giving it some TLC. I haven't got round to doing any work on it yet, but I'm collecting all the bits I want.

I've had plans to fit a Monster S4 swingarm for ages, these are ally instead of the standard steel item and are the same part number as an ST4S has as standard, and the same as the DP upgrade kit for 2's and 4's (minus the Ohlins shock of course).

Lo and behold, there's been one on eBay for the last week, and for most of the afternoon, I've been the highest bidder - until the last 20 seconds, when I was outbid. Now, here's the thing, I instantly pumped in two much, much higher bid within the last few seconds but even those higher bids were instantly outbid. I was obviously trying to manually outbid some sniping software and didn't get another chance because - game over...auction ended!

Even more annoying is that I was outbid, not by an ordinary punter, but by a well known on-line spares operation. Obviously a professional eBayer with all the tricks and sniping software up their sleeve. Somehow, I wouldn't mind so much being outbid by another bloke wanting to tart their own bike up, but to know that the same item is almost certainly going back on eBay almost immediately for sale at a profit sticks in my throat. Still, one small victory for the little man is that I was considering buying a couple of hundred quids worth of stuff off the same operation - and now I'll shop elsewhere.

The biggest puzzle I have about sniping software is that it appeared to be blocking my bids. How does that work? My last bid before the auction ended was £126 and it came back instantly as still being outbid (and the auction was still live, otherwise it would've given me the auction ended message instead - like it did the next time I bid). And yet, the final price of the item was £88. Surely my valid bid at £126 should've forced the bid up to at least that level? Why didn't matey end up paying a higher price to outbid me?

Seems I lost out on the item and the seller lost an extra £38, so this stuff works against the interests of both the ordinary buyer and seller.

I know that in the eBay world of buyer beware and sharkey practises this is pretty small beer - even if it is irritating for a few minutes. At least I'm not being scammed to death. However, I've decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em...

Does anybody know a good sniping tool?

[Redsps]

jools, ebay is becoming a complete and utter pain now.
I been using it since 2000
It used be good up until 18 months ago, now you get hassle after hassle.
best option is to put in 1 and only bid which is your utter max bid amount and add a bit ontop, and place your bid approx 3 mins before the end, I use this method and it has yet to let me down, can't say that it will be that cheap though.

cheers
Robin

[TP]

No snipe software I've heard of will block a bid. I'm not sure why you were putting in valid bids and they were not going through.

My experience with snipe software is that it will only act on a set time (user confgured) before the end of the auction - usually a few seconds. It wouldn't bid at any time before that so a user just bidding on the website would still see their bid there. The only way I know of to auto-increment your bid like you were seeing is using e-bay's max bid system where if someone has entered a max bid higher than your bid it will auto-incremement to a bid above yours. Yours should still register in the bid history though.

I've used Snipe! successfully in the past but missed out on a slipper clutch setting it too low - 4 seconds. I still got the slipper clutch by contacting the auction owner and getting another one he had. I won a full set of fairings with it set to 5 seconds (allows for the vagaries of network latency getting to the ebay servers). Another one I've tried and worked was actually a Snipe company on the web that gives you 5 free auctions when you join and then you pay a set amount after that (if you introduce people you get more free ones etc).

Snipe! cost me $10USD through paypal and it works ok, I think the online well-connected ones that host your snipe could have a slight advantage being connected closer to the internet backbone they could afford to come in a bit later - towards the end of the auction. I can't remember who I used now but if you're keen I could do a search and try and find out?

TP

[Harv748]

I've never quite understood this argument.

This is not a pop in anyway Jools, to your goodself or anyone else, but (as someone who has NEVER used ebay) I thought the idea was to enter your highest amount (you are willing to pay), and the ebay software does the rest, raisng your current bid if need be upto your maximum. If you are then outbid, you can increase your bid if you think its worth it.

If you had put in, say a maximum of whatever you where willing to pay (say £150) at the beginning, unless the 'dealer' was willing to pay more, then you would have won it.

It seems to me, waiting till the end and trying to get a bargain just doesn't work anymore. Your better off just putting in your maximum bid at the start ...and if you win it at a lower price, great...but if your outbid...then so be it.

As for me...I'm just a sucker who usually pays the full price

[Ian900SLV]

I use a free snipeing service on the web and it has won me a fair few auctions, I only bid what I am willing to pay and if thats not enough then so be it

Ian

[Jasper]

You have mail,Jools.

[Jools]

Originally posted by Harv748
I've never quite understood this argument.

This is not a pop in anyway Jools, to your goodself or anyone else, but (as someone who has NEVER used ebay) I thought the idea was to enter your highest amount (you are willing to pay), and the ebay software does the rest, raisng your current bid if need be upto your maximum. If you are then outbid, you can increase your bid if you think its worth it.

If you had put in, say a maximum of whatever you where willing to pay (say £150) at the beginning, unless the 'dealer' was willing to pay more, then you would have won it.

True, and that's what I usually do. However, I put a max bid of £86 in just over an hour before the close of the auction (I usually go a quid or so over the 80, 85, 90 etc because lots of people bids in increments of a fiver).

When I put my bid in, there had been 12 bids, starting at £4.99 with most of the bid increments at something like 50 pence. There had only been sporadic bidding, and the price had crept up to a dizzy 20 something quid, and some people had dropped out when the bidding went above £15, so it looked as if the interest was fairly low. Based on that, I put my bid in at £86 thinking that since interest was low I would probably get it for that even if it wasn't the maximum I was prepared to pay. Naturally my £86 bid boshed the £20 boys, but it did push my winning bid to £77, so somebody had obviously bid up into the £70's. I did think that there wasn't a big winning margin there and thought about upping it to the max I was prepared to pay, but then thought that (since I work from home nowadays and have the luxury of sitting there as the auction counts down) I would be able to up my bid if I was outbid myself. And being outbid is obviously what happened.

What I still can't understand is that in the last 30 seconds of the auction I put my max bid in at £126, eBay came back with "sorry you've been outbid, please enter a bid of (and it was something stupid like) £130.37 or more". I quickly thought shall I go another tenner, yeah...but too late, game over.

So the question still stands. I definitely put in a valid bid of £126 while the auction was still live, and was told it still wasn't enough to win...so why was the winning bid just £88?

I'm not irritated anymore, I'll just get my skanky old swingarm powder coated along with my wheels. It'll still look good and cost peanuts comparitively, but I am still puzzled why a lower bid than mine won the auction

[deej]

whats a sniper tool, i use ebay a lot and have never heard of this before. is this some kind of tool that you can set to bid for you at a certain time, something you could use whilst at work or out on the road. where can i get 1 as it sounds a good idea if used sensibly

ive had problems getting the bid accepted with a few minutes/seconds to go as someone/thing has outbid be but i just asumed that they were online too. so ive rebid and no problems even if i have lost the item.

ebay does seem to be getting full of greedy people now,the baragins arent there like they used to be

[Paul James]

Same thing happened to me a couple of times Jools when I was trying to buy an oil cooler for herselfs poxy old 600 Bandit. The other thing I've had is where you ae up to the last 30 seconds having logged in to your account, you place a bid at the last knockiongs and Ebay asks you to log back in ARGHHHHHHH!!!!

[Jasper]

Deej.Your right.A sniping program allows you to put in your maximum bid and when to place it(ie 8 seconds to go),it just does it all for you.You can still lose if someone originally put in a higher bid than your snipe,of course.